Vanessa Engle on why women still do too much around the home

Naomi West talks to the maker of Women, a new BBC documentary series about
feminism.

‘This was a vast and very rapid social revolution,” says filmmaker Vanessa Engle of the Women’s Liberation Movement. “It’s remarkable that such dramatic recent history should already be so irrelevant to people. It’s all rather paradoxical…”

Engle has made a trilogy of documentaries, entitled Women, about this movement – and this paradox – airing on BBC Four from Monday (International Women’s Day). With an approach that is observational rather than polemical, she focuses on the larger-than-life women who propelled the revolution (in an episode entitled “Libbers”), today’s middle-class mums (“Mothers”) and the dedicated 21st-century agitators (“Activists”).

She speaks to those for whom feminism is a “religion” and to those for whom it is not even a footnote; as one working mother, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, says unapologetically: “I’m not quite sure what feminism is.”

Certainly, Engle has turned her camera on feminists at a “confusing” time: “Legislatively the games have been won, broadly speaking. Yet there are still so many causes for concern: the rise in internet pornography, the fact that there is as much prostitution if not more than there ever was, that lap-dancing clubs are acceptable on the high street…”

It was the challenges of family life – not central to feminist campaigns (“Both in the Seventies and now, full-time activists tend to be young women without children,” says Engle) – that prompted her to embark on Women, her three-film project for the BBC (previous series include Jews and Lefties).

“I am in my forties and a mother of two children [sons aged 10 and 13],” she says. “It’s in my field of vision all the time that I see women working too hard. Women do still seem to be doing the bulk of the domestic work. It’s a completely conventional aspiration for women to settle down and have a family. Yet it’s the most unbelievably demanding life to lead.”

She has managed her career and family life by being “extremely, extremely organised” and wonders if this is an inevitable side-effect of women gaining ground outside the home: “In order to achieve a level of autonomy, have we had to strive so hard that we’ve become a generation of madly over-controlling women?”

Engle was involved in the women’s movement while at Oxford studying languages in the 1980s; she protested outside porn shops, joined the Reclaim the Night march against male violence. She had known of the feminist figures featured in “Libbers” – such as Robin Morgan, Ann Oakley, Kate Millett – since reading key books in her late teens.

On film they emerge as nuanced human beings whose advancement of women’s rights often came with considerable personal sacrifice. Engle buries the old stereotype of the humourless feminist, capturing New

York-based Susan Brownmiller chortling at her own naive expectations of the time her book Against Our Will was published in 1975: “I thought I’d be more popular. That’s what happens to male writers… I would say categorically men aren’t attracted to women who write books on rape.”

The most memorable interview is with American novelist Marilyn French, who subsequently died last May of heart failure. French speaks eloquently of her own feminism, her unhappy marriage and the rape of her daughter in 1971. “She discharged herself from hospital to give that interview. There was a sense that she was going on the record for the last time,” says Engle.

One development that the 1970s sisterhood would not have dreamed of in their worst nightmares is the explosion of “raunch culture”. Engle is convinced by arguments that this rash female self-objectification is a consequence of the feminist movement – the aim of 1970s feminism to free women from oppression became muddled with Thatcherite ideals of personal freedom. “Feminism never argued women should be free to do whatever we want including getting our t--s out in the newspapers,” she says. “I think it’s the most unbelievable and terrible misunderstanding.”

Engle’s third film shows that the young women protesting against these issues are strikingly few – but to her this is less a sign of feminism’s demise, more a reflection that the political landscape has utterly transformed since the libbers first spoke up. “Good old-fashioned protest doesn’t seem to do the job any more. The question is: how do you protest now?”